Spin the wheel
- 50 tools
- No watermark
- No daily limit
Paste a list of names and spin. Every spin comes with a seed, and a seed is what turns a draw from something people have to take your word for into something anyone can run again and check. The names stay in this tab: a list of staff or customers is personal data, and every other wheel on the web uploads it to somebody else's server before it will spin.
One name per line. Press spin, or click the wheel itself.
Announce a seed before you draw and anybody can put it in here afterwards, with the same list, and get the same winner. That is what makes a draw checkable rather than just claimed.
Frequently asked questions
Are the names uploaded?
No. They stay in this tab and the wheel is drawn on your own machine. The site’s security policy sets connect-src ‘none’, so the browser blocks network requests from these pages, so nothing could be sent even if the code tried. This matters more than it sounds: a list of employees, customers or competition entrants is personal data, and handing it to a website to run a prize draw is the sort of thing a privacy policy is supposed to stop you doing.
How do I prove the draw was fair?
Announce the seed before you draw, and publish the list. Afterwards anybody can come here, paste the same list in the same order, put your seed in the seed box, and get the same winner. If they get somebody else, the list changed. The "copy the proof" button gives you the seed, the number of names and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact list, which is enough for somebody to check all of it.
Is it actually random?
The winner is chosen from a seeded generator, and when you do not give a seed the seed itself comes from the operating system's own random source, the same one used for encryption keys. `Math.random` is not used anywhere here: it is not built to be unpredictable, and it cannot be seeded, which would make the checking above impossible. The distribution is tested: sixty thousand draws over six names, and each has to win between nine and eleven thousand times.
The wheel is animated. Does where it stops decide the winner?
No, and it is worth saying plainly. The winner is drawn first and the wheel is then animated to land on it. It is the opposite of how it looks. A wheel where the physics decided the outcome would produce a result nobody could reproduce, and everything above about checking the draw would be untrue.
Can I draw several winners at once?
Not on this page: a wheel picks one thing, which is what a wheel is for. Ticking "take the winner off the wheel" and spinning again is the usual way, and it is how a draw with several prizes is normally run in front of an audience.
What happens with duplicate names?
They stay, and each one gets its own slice. Two people called the same thing are two people, and quietly merging them would halve somebody's chance of winning without telling anyone. If you want them merged, remove the duplicate yourself.
How many names can it take?
A thousand. Past about forty the names stop fitting on the slices, so the wheel shows colours only and the winner is still announced in words underneath. For a long list the wheel is mostly theatre anyway, and it works perfectly well as one.